Posts Tagged ‘modernism’

This film has been very difficult to see, consistently selling out (I saw scalpers at the last showing). The Vancouver International Film Fest is hosting this new set of screenings, based on the popular demand. Tickets are selling quickly so if you want to go, buy now.

These photos of Ron Thom’s Boyd House are from the blog Architecture Wanted which provides a good introduction to this house. Also see a great post by Cam McLellan on his Vancouver Lights blog and an article in Western Living by the house’s current owner, Kerry McPhedran.

When humans apply this much care to designing things, it makes me almost teary. This chair is a life-raft on a tidal wave of mass-produced cynicism. The person who made this chair was doing something so careful it’s almost spiritual.

The designer is German architect Hans Luckhardt (1890-1954), well known for designing steel tube chairs in the 1920s and 30s.

Photography is only minimally allowed at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West, his winter house in Arizona, so most of these photos are just exterior shots. It seems to be a form of sacrilege to admit to not being a fan of FLW’s work, but I’ve never been as impressed by him as others are and Taliesin West provided a good example of why.

If you’re in Vancouver on July 28, and are interested in the vernacular modernist architecture of our region, buy a ticket for this event. Ouno is hosting this fundraiser to benefit the completion of the film Coast Modern by my filmmaker friends Gavin Froome and Mike Bernard.

“Compare and despair” is good advice, but I can’t help it. Here are two skyscrapers designed for the same public corporation, BC Hydro. The first, shown above, is a modernist beauty in the international style by Ned Pratt and Ron Thom of Thomson Berwick Pratt, 1955.

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That essay on colonial heritage hipsters

Read this on cities

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This blog is, and always has been, ad-free. No sponsored/external content, and no, I don't want you to help me "monetize" it or improve my SEO. No solicitation emails please. Thanks for your attention to this matter.

This Blog

This blog is a long, somewhat messy photo essay on the history and politics of design. Design's socio-historical context—that is, the constraints and influences on the way we make objects, dwellings and cities—seems too often ignored. We no longer know where our styles, tastes or objects really come from, and this damages our creativity and sense of meaning. Historical knowledge is so fugitive in the New World, with everything so decontextualized in the rapid flow of commodities and images. Don't even get me started on tumblr and pinterest.

As Fran Lebowitz said, "Designers now, they all have these things called mood boards. I suppose they think a sense of discovery equals invention. It would be as if every writer had a board with paragraphs of other writers—'Oh, I'll take a little bit of this, and that, he was really good.' Yes, he was really good! And that is not a mood board, it is a stealing board."

As for the sort of design I'm personally interested in, full disclaimer.....read more

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Book in progress: Habitat

To read about my book project on Vancouver's UN-Habitat Forum event of 1976 concerning just and sustainable urban settlements, click here. Few know that Buckminster Fuller, Margaret Mead, Mother Teresa, Paolo Soleri and Maggie & Pierre Trudeau, along with many thousands of others, came to Vancouver in 1976 to talk about better, safer, fairer and greener cities worldwide. In fact it was the founding conference of UN Habitat, an agency built around a foundational document called The Vancouver Declaration. My book is about what happened that year and is a snapshot not just of Vancouver but of how people around the world began to view cities and themselves differently in the wake of, among other things, the first oil crisis.
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